Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds (16 page)

He came to an open hatch and peeked into an empty compartment. Crew quarters. He eyed the knickknacks and souvenirs, erotica, art, and pornography the breakabouts had picked up in their travels.

Every item was secured against weightlessness or maneuver forces.

The sound of a nearby hatch made him yank back into the passageway. An outrageous being appeared, gurgling Terranglish, which he supposed to mean that it wasn't a colleague of Bartleby.

To his credit, Floyt stood his ground. His experience in the
Bruja
had been unnerving at times, but nothing, he'd decided, to excuse unreasoning panic.

"Oh, thank you! Thank you so much, Gabriel," the thing was gushing, "for the loan of your token." It held up a little doodad of some sort in one tentacle. In another, it clasped a bulging bag that clinked and swung heavily. A third embraced a Monopoly game; others caressed the deeds from the game—all of them.

"My pleasure, Squeeb," Gabriel said, following the Hyperbolarian out into the passageway from his cabin.

One of the eyestalks had caught sight of Floyt, but Squeeb's attention was still on the broker. "Do you think … that is, the token is doubtless an heirloom—"

"It's been in the family forever," Gabriel conceded.

"But I'd hoped you could see your way clear to … it's been so lucky for me—"

"Fifty ovals?" Gabriel suggested.

"Done!" The creature dipped into its sack and counted out the sum. Floyt did a quick conversion in his head and concluded that this Squeeb had had himself a streak of luck. Gabriel's smile couldn't have been any wider without injuring his face.

The two parted in mutual affection. The being waltzed happily in Floyt's direction. "Greetings upon you," it chirped. "Citizen Floyt, are you not?"

"I am."

"How do you do? I am Apprentice Squeeb, and this Monopoly game is the craze that will soon grip all Hyperbole."

"Oh? Er, good." At least, he hoped it was.

"I must be off," Squeeb told him. "But you must promise to tell me about your Earth. Some of
Bruja's
tapes gave me knowledge of its history. Observe!"

Squeeb shifted his various burdens and placed one tentacle reverently over the region of his heart. He then began to sing with great feeling.

"Oh, I wish I were in Disney, Away! Away!

In Disneyland I'll take my stand,

To live and die in Disney!

—That's one of my favorites!"

Floyt coughed, "Yes, well, we'll have to talk about that sometime."

"Tickety-boo! Bye for now!" Squeeb sallied off to gloat over his ramazz and his entrepreneurial future.

"Citizen Floyt," Gabriel said, who'd watched the whole thing, "you're the man I've been looking for."

"I'm afraid that board games really aren't my strong suit."

"Mine either. I have something that might interest you, though."

The keepsakes in the crew quarters had aroused Floyt's acquisitive urges. He entered the broker's booth of a cabin and accepted a seat on the bunk while Gabriel perched on the desk. They were practically touching knees. It reminded Floyt of his hall closet study on Earth. "What did you want to show me?" he asked.

"This," answered Gabriel. He held an auto-styrette in his hand.

CHAPTER 9—TRANSPORTS OF DELIGHT

Some inner watchdog that had been on guard since the woman had ambushed him on Terra acted now.

Floyt pushed himself to one side almost instantly, lashing out with his feet. He made contact; Gabriel yelled as Floyt, unable to get past him, leaped on him, clutching the hand that held the injector. They lurched together for a few seconds, then tumbled into the passageway, falling to the deck.

"The captain has the power to marry you, y'know," Alacrity said, bending over them.

"He's crazy!
Chinga
!"
Gabriel hollered, struggling to his feet.

"I—he—" the Earther floundered as Alacrity helped him up.

"C'mon," Alacrity cut him off, snatching up the styrette and glancing around to make sure they hadn't been seen. Floyt allowed himself to be crowded into the cabin again.

Gabriel was still boiling with oaths. "He should be locked up, that's what!"

Alacrity persuaded Gabriel to palm a hidden lock on his bunk. Noiselessly a huge tray slid out of concealment. Floyt gaped at niches holding expensive recording gear and other instruments, jewelry, phials and bottles of liquid, capsules and spansules and tablets, styrettes and inhalers. There were info slugs, costly proteases, and false documentation.

Floyt saw that he'd interrupted a sales pitch, not a murder attempt. "I'm so sorry! Commerce never occurred to me."

"What's in the styrette?" Alacrity asked.

"A mnemonic drug." Gabriel looked to Floyt. "I mean, you're doing research, aren't you? That's why you're traveling, right? I thought you could use it." His anger had ebbed. "You made an honest mistake, I guess."

"You've got to be more careful around my associate here," Alacrity cautioned. "You're lucky I came along when I did." He slipped Floyt a wink.

As they made their way back to their cabin, Floyt noticed Alacrity's bleary eyes and surmised,

"Monopoly?"

"Ever since I left you. I got cleaned out," he sighed. "People who enjoy a game are one thing; life forms who get sexual gratification out of it—"

"Maybe we can get your cross back from Gabriel. I assume that was your cross in his treasure trove."

"Yes. Well, Sim knew she was bankrolling me with it when she gave it to me."

Back in the cabin, Alacrity handed Floyt a fistful of data slugs. "I borrowed these for you. I figured you'd be through with that Earthservice manure pile you call a briefing file by now."

Floyt sorted through the little lozenges, activating their labels. Lurid graphics with an emphasis on passion, violence, and sensationalism popped into view.

"Caspahr Weir Versus the Transuranic Flame Goddesses of Death,"
he read from the first. And from the second,
"Caspahr Weir and the Invasion of the Time Maggots
—Alacrity, what in the world
are
these?"

"This title's my personal favorite." Alacrity singled one out.
"Caspahr Weir Meets the Teleporting
Pygmies from the Galactic Core."

The books had all been written by, or at least published under the pseudonym of, Bombastico Herdman. "Weir was one of those characters nobody really knew much about," Alacrity explained, "even while he was making history. But a lot of people were curious, so somebody fictionalized him."

"Penny dreadfuls!" Floyt cried. "Dime novels; shilling shockers; pulps."

Now it was the breakabout's turn to look nonplussed. "Lofty examples of early Terran literature,"

Floyt clarified.

Communications on Earth were instantaneous, of course, or near enough as made no difference. But the fastest that information could travel among the stars was the speed of a messenger ship. Too, the use of modern recording equipment wasn't always feasible, for a staggering variety of reasons. There was also an incalculable amount going on, constantly, everywhere.

All of this had brought about a renewal of the human powers of description. It had revived as well certain of the earliest forms: tall tales, the traveler's narrative, legends, and folklore. And these books.

Floyt recalled that the opening of the American West was as much invented on the spot as chronicled.

"The bos'n I borrowed them from said that this Bombastico guy doesn't write about Weir anymore.

But I thought there might be something useful in with all the swash."

Floyt held the "penny dreadfuls"—that was how he thought of them—in his hand. "Thank you, Alacrity. I appreciate it."

Alacrity was fiddling with his Monopoly piece. "Look, I want to get this deal behind me, I admit that, but I want to do it the right way. I don't know if it's occurred to you, but there're things I'd prefer to be doing right now, too."

He thought for a moment before adding, "Things that are very important to me."

"I see."

"Capital Veldemar's due to cut out the Breakers in about another couple hundred hours," Alacrity announced. Then he stretched out, silver and gray mane cradled on his interlaced fingers, face to the bulkhead. He was snoring softly within seconds.

Despite
Bruja's
purification system, the air carried more than a hint of incense when the skipper conducted mass. Floyt came down with a slight case of what Alacrity referred to as the "flow-flows." The breakabout said, "It happens to everyone, sooner or later," and gave him one of the powerful nostrums that were common among travelers. Alacrity somehow managed to get back into a marathon Monopoly game, winning back a small measure of what he'd lost. Floyt read the books of Bombastico Herdman, delighting in their outrageous fabrications.

Time passed.

In the
Bruja's
entertainment banks, the Terran discovered, among other things, recordings of long-ago Earth radio and television broadcasts, recaptured when humanity's expansion had outraced the speed of light. Floyt found them engrossing, if frequently incomprehensible. Fibber McGee's closet made him howl with delight, though, while original footage (that incredibly outdated word!) of early space exploration stirred him in spite of Earthservice indoctrination.

He discovered recordings of a contemporary series, an extremely popular program called

"Doomsday." To his amazement, it concentrated solely on disasters of planetary dimensions. Worldwide deluges, complete social breakdown, and global quakes were among the things relentlessly catalogued and rated for destruction and misery.

When he mentioned it to Alacrity, the breakabout's voice became brittle with animosity. "Yeah, if some poor bastard's home's been hit by an asteroid thirty kilometers wide, you can bet there'll be a ghoul from 'Doomsday' on the scene, sticking a pickup in his face and saying, 'How do you
feel
at this moment, sir?' Some places, they run that show all day and all night, the All-Doomsday Channel. Myself, I can't stomach it."

Neither could Floyt. He dismissed the program as a mental disorder.

He came to like the
Bruja's
highly spiced food, and the flow-flows didn't recur. He spent hours staring at the Inheritor's belt and wondering what was to come. He had several bouts of homesickness, although his conditioning helped a little against that. In due course, Capitan Valdemar cut out the Breakers. The ship was in Epiphany's stellar system.

The
Bruja's
PA system struck up "El Desembarque," as the two companions made their way to her main lock with their baggage. Except in the broad sense, the vessel wasn't anywhere near Epiphany. By law, outsystem craft were required to stop at Palladium, the system's heavily fortified third planet. When the pair passed the big viewport blister near the airlock, the Earther stopped dead. Alacrity nearly trod his heels before he, too, saw that the scene was worth a look.

Palladium was a glowing, red-gold, clouded-ball. But even more august were the aircraft lying close by the
Bruja.

Outsystem traffic was confined to a tight holding area, with the majority of the planet's weaponry concentrated on it. But even that rigidly defined volume of space was so large that vessels were rarely within visual range of one another. However, Floyt and Alacrity could see no less than four gargantuan starships from where they stood.

The breakabout cursed softly.
Bruja
crewmen were crowding to get a look too. Three colossal dreadnaughts, like gleaming scarab beetles, floated more or less at rest, relative to the freighter. They were quilled and stubbled with weapons and the vibrissae of detection and commo gear. The ships struck Floyt as ominous and invulnerable.

The battlewagons were ranged around the fourth ship, though, and it was that one that really arrested the attention of the onlookers. At some six kilometers in length, she was an incredible Faberge egg of a vessel, dwarfing the warships.

"That's the
King's Ransom,
Governor Redlock's flagship," Juan-Feng piped up. Floyt recalled that Redlock was Weir's grandnephew by his only marriage. Weir himself had died without issue. Redlock had served the old man as a military commander and political counselor since first coming into manhood.

Weir had apparently been very fond of him.

"The other three are ships of the Severeemish Navy," Duarte added.

"It looks like some kind of standoff," Floyt said. He wondered in alarm if they'd wandered into the opening engagement of a war. From what his briefing file had said, the Severeemish were the most militaristic of the governments that had been obliged to acknowledge allegiance to Weir. They were also easily provoked, and since Weir's death, the Severeemish had been restive.

"No standoff," Ortega opined.
"King's Ransom
may look like a fat target, but from what I've heard, she could have three battlewagons for a light snack."

"Still, I wouldn't want to be within a couple of AUs if they started spitting at each other," Alacrity declared. "What're we doing here?"

"Orders from Palladium Control, right after we came out of Hawking. We're to transfer you directly to
King's Ransom.
It seems the governor's giving you a lift to Epiphany, personally."

Ortega grinned at their expressions. "Now, now, don't look so pale, my friends. Remember, they've declared High Truce, at least until Director Weir's will had been read."

There was no point in objecting;
Bruja
warped for the awesome flagship. Closer in, they could make out weaponry and other equipment among the vessel's overdone ornamental splendor. There were also environmental enclosures, immense ones, containing not just aeroponics and hydroponics, but parks, groves of trees, and what appeared to be open bodies of water. Then the
King's Ransom
filled the blister. Juan-Feng, nervous, urged the two passengers to the lock.

Freighter mated to flagship, and the lock cycled. The
Bruja's
captain and his first mate arrived, distracting Floyt for a moment. He started when he saw the ranks of men waiting in the open lock.